Headlines That Will Make You Succeed in Search and Social

The headline is the single most important piece of content on a web page. It makes people interested in the content, makes them click (or not click) on your links and is also an important ranking signal for search engines when deciding what a page should rank for. 

Sometimes it doesn’t matter how great the content is. If the headline is uninteresting, people won't even bother opening the page.

So Why Did We Choose This Particular Headline for This Post?

Well, you are here, aren’t you? And the reason why might be how this particular headline is composed. But let’s start by looking at the search aspect of things.

Provide Search Engines with Keywords

A search engine is supposed to find you the most accurate and relevant information based on a search query. By analyzing the content – everything from meta data and headlines to main text, images and video – it tries to decipher the value of each page in relation to what you typed in the search box.

Even though Google (and its competitors) is getting better and better at understanding videos, images and other types of content, text is still the most powerful tool when optimizing a page. The key is to provide Google with words that are relevant.

Consequently, generic tabloid or clickbait headlines are pretty worthless when it comes to SEO. When the Google bot reads something along the lines of “You can’t believe what happens next” or “This will blow your mind”, it’s impossible for the algorithms to interpret the topic of the page. Even if the page is strong – it sits on a trusted domain and has several backlinks – what words should it rank for?

To please Google, you should always try to include keywords that actually say something about the content. 

Make People Want to Click and Read Your Content

To write a truly successful headline, however, you need to combine searchability with clickability. In social media, the choice of headline is crucial when trying to stand out in the feed. Your potential visitor only spends a split second deciding whether or not to click.

So How Do You Write a Successful Headline for Social Media?

We got the answer from the people behind the website Buzzsumo. By analyzing 100 million (!) headlines, they’ve found out what actually drives most engagement. These are some of their findings:

Best Headline Phrases on Facebook

Looking at the stats from Buzzsumo, there’s one particular phrase that stands out: “X will make you Y.” Headlines including this phrase have gained more than double the number of engagements compared to the second best phrase: “This is why X.” 

Other successful headlines include emotional phrases such as “X give you goosebumps” and headlines that trigger curiosity such as “X are freaking out about Y”.

Below is a complete list of the best preforming headline phrases on Facebook

Image credit: http://buzzsumo.com/blog/most-shared-headlines-study/

Best Headline Phrases for Twitter

It’s easy to think that the same type of headlines works well on all social media, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be true. Buzzsumo found that the best headlines on Twitter are more analytic and less emotional compared to Facebook.

Image credit: http://buzzsumo.com/blog/most-shared-headlines-study/

Combine Search and Social

Having a grasp of what works in social media can be an effective tool when writing articles and headlines to promote your website. However, you still have to take your audience into consideration. What do they want to read? And equally important, how do you want to be perceived?

There’s also a risk of inflation in certain phrases. You should probably mix it up u bit and not only write articles around X will make you Y and 10 stunning photos of X. You are probably more than that!

But if you manage to claim something in the title, whether it’s that the reader will get an emotional reaction or find out revealing facts about something, you improve the chance to earn the click. If you can also combine this with best-practice SEO, your piece can live on in the search engines well after it’s been pushed down in Facebook and Twitter feeds.